Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Simonov cited Stalin’s detailed annotations of Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) to show that while he approved of his future rival’s staunch defence of revolutionary violence during the civil war, it didn’t go far enough. According to Trotsky, the dictatorship of the proletariat was exercised by the communist party. Stalin considered Trotsky’s reasoning ‘inexact’ and preferred the idea of the party as a political apparatus that dominated the state and other public organisations such as the trade unions. According to Simonov, classical Marxism viewed the state ‘mechanistically’ as a temporary, artificial instrument of capitalist class power, whereas Stalin’s ‘organicist’ view of state saw it as a long-term entity whose continued existence as a coercive force was essential to the protection of the Soviet socialist system. Classical Marxism pointed towards a process of democratisation and a reduction of the state’s power over citizens, while Stalin’s theory of the state provided a rationalisation for his repressive rule under the guise of defending socialism against its enemies.

Stalin’s deviation from the traditional Marxist theory of the state under socialism was no secret. At the 18th party congress in March 1939, he mounted a spirited public defence of his revision of the views of Marx, Engels and Lenin. What the three great teachers had not anticipated, Stalin told the delegates, was that socialism would triumph in a single state that would then have to co-exist with powerful capitalist states. Under conditions of capitalist encirclement, the Soviet Union needed a strong state apparatus to defend itself against external threats and internal subversion. Only when capitalism was liquidated globally would the state, in accordance with Marxist theory, wither away.⁹⁶

In December 1994 another former IM-L staffer, the journalist and politician Boris Slavin, published an article in Pravda that examined some of the comments Stalin had written in his library books. Slavin was particularly interested in his reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, noting Stalin’s adherence to the classical Marxist definition of freedom as the recognition of necessity. Slavin also noted Stalin’s favourite philosophical aphorisms: ‘Lots of learning does not teach understanding’ (Heraclitus); ‘Marxism is a guide to action, not a dogma’ (Lenin); and ‘Freedom lies beyond the realm of material necessity’ (Marx).⁹⁷

Dutch historian Erik van Ree, who was interested in Stalin’s political thought, was the first western scholar to extensively research his library books. His presumption before he set out for Moscow in 1994 was that the key to understanding the evolution of Stalin’s thinking was the impact of Russian political traditions on his Marxism. That belief was ‘shaken’ by his encounter with the contents of Stalin’s private library, which were overwhelmingly Marxist and betrayed little or no sign of non-Marxist influences. Van Ree’s conclusion, after studying every single one of Stalin’s annotations, was that Stalin was primarily a creature of the rationalist and utopian west European revolutionary tradition that began with the Enlightenment. While the dictator did absorb some Russian traditions – autocracy and the strong state, for example – he fitted them into a Marxist framework. Stalin admired some of the Tsars – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great – but thought that, armed with Marxist theory, he could do a better job of creating a powerful, protective Soviet state. The end result in Stalin’s thinking was what van Ree termed ‘revolutionary patriotism’ – the primacy of the defence of the socialist fatherland. Revolution abroad remained a key goal but its pursuit was adapted to the reality of Soviet co-existence with a hostile capitalist world composed of competing nation states.⁹⁸

Among the first Russian scholars to explore Stalin’s library books were Boris Ilizarov and Yevgeny Gromov. Ilizarov started working on the library in the late 1990s, when the books still contained what he imagined to be the detritus of Stalin’s pipe!⁹⁹ Suitably inspired, he went on to publish a series of groundbreaking articles and books, both on Stalin’s reading life and, most importantly, on the history of the library.¹⁰⁰